“Le Perv” Beats the Rap

A questionable history of sexual indiscretions caught up with the man considered to be the next president of France, but not enough to bring him down.

(Editor’s Note: On August 23, 2011 all criminal charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn were dismissed by the New York Supreme Court at the request of the Manhattan Attorney General’s Office.

On December 10, 2012 New York Supreme Court Justice Douglas E. McKeon announced in court in the Bronx that the civil suit filed against Strauss-Kahn by former hotel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo had been settled in his chambers 10 minutes earlier. Ms. Diallo said after the hearing, “I thank everyone all over the world who supported me and everyone at the court. God bless you.” The terms of the settlement were kept confidential by agreement of both parties. Attorneys for Strauss-Kahn adamantly denied a report in a French newspaper that the settlement was for $6 million.)

“I deny in the strongest possible terms the allegations which I now face; I am confident that the truth will come out and I will be exonerated. In the meantime, I cannot accept that the Fund—and you dear colleagues—should in any way have to share my own personal nightmare. So, I had to go.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in an e-mail to employees of the Washington, D.C.-based International Monetary Fund after tendering his resignation as its $500,000-a-year managing director.

Few Americans had ever heard of Dominique Strauss-Kahn when news broke that New York detectives had snatched him from a soon-to-depart Paris-bound jetliner and charged him with attempted rape. His arrest came with lightning speed on Saturday afternoon. May 14, 2011.

A powerful French politician and a top global economist, Strauss-Kahn maintained such a low U.S. profile that—even weeks after his arrest rocked the French political landscape—many people in the States still best knew him as “the French IMF Guy.”

This “guy,” it was later realized, had been the likely next president of France. Polls there had predicted Strauss-Kahn would have defeated President Nicolas Sarkozy by a 61-to-39-percent margin.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More